Seagate 250 GB not detected: 100 % recovered and recloned
250 Go · 2026 · Bruxelles
Failure : A Brussels security company called us on a Monday morning: the workstation running their business software would no longer boot. The drive, a 250 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 fitted in an HP Compaq 8000 Elite, was spinning normally but had stopped appearing in the BIOS. It held not only the company's files but a specialised application installed years earlier, whose installation media and licence keys had long since vanished. Reinstalling was not an option: the whole system had to come back, not just the documents. Fortunately the client had not spent days switching the machine on and off.
Work done : Diagnosis showed a mechanically healthy drive: platters spinning, heads positioning correctly. The fault was in the service area. Connected to the terminal through PC-3000, the drive answered, but its configuration modules would no longer read properly: the translator was unreadable, which is exactly why the BIOS saw nothing. We worked directly in the service area to rebuild the translator and make the user space addressable again. The surface itself was tired: this 2011 drive had built up a large number of bad sectors. Imaging was therefore done under Data Extractor, map by map, pushing the slow zones to the end of the pass so the drive was not restarted needlessly. Once the full image was in hand, we wrote it back to the new drive the client had brought in, system and software included.
Result : The failure was in the service area, not on the heads: that is what made a full recovery possible. 100 % of the data was read, and the workstation went back with its system and its business application intact, on a brand-new drive.
WD My Passport 5 TB, USB port torn off: 100 % recovered
5 To · 2026 · Bruxelles
Failure : A Brussels client was working with her external drive plugged into her computer. Standing up, she turned too quickly: the cable pulled and the drive was left hanging from its connector. That single movement is enough to tear the USB port off the board. She first took the drive to a computer shop, where someone tried to reattach the broken connector with thin hand-soldered wires. The repair did not hold and the drive stayed invisible. Western Digital had offered to take the unit back despite the expired warranty, but her five terabytes of data would never have come back with it.
Work done : On this model the USB bridge is built into the board: there is no SATA connector, so the drive cannot simply be plugged in like an internal disk. First power-up on the PC-3000 Portable Pro: the unit started beeping, the signature of a short circuit. The shop's improvised soldering had bridged two points on the board. We removed what was left of the connector, soldered our own wires directly onto the board's test points and ran them to an adapter, which gives SATA access to a drive that has none. The ROM was then read and the drive unlocked under PC-3000, the board checked point by point to rule out any remaining short, and refitted. That left the decisive question: the state of the heads. They were intact.
Result : The failure was purely electronic: the heads and platters were untouched. That is why the invoice stopped at the electronics, less than half the cost of a mechanical recovery, and why 100 % of the data was copied. The client left with her drive, still intending to send it in under warranty.
LaCie Rugged USB-C 4 TB dropped, heads replaced
4 To · 2026 · Hasselt
Failure : The working drive of a professional photographer from the Hasselt area, a 4 TB LaCie Rugged USB-C, fell to the floor. It held her entire shoot archive: RAW files and video rushes from client projects, with no backup copy. After the fall, no access at all. Inside the enclosure was a Seagate ST4000LM024 with a locked service area: the drive could no longer initialise. One decisive detail: nobody tried to restart it. The client wrote to us that same Sunday and dropped the drive off in the evening.
Work done : Before any power was applied, the drive was opened in the cleanroom: the head stack was removed and inspected under the microscope to confirm that no head was contaminated or damaged by the fall. The heads were clean, so they were refitted, and only then was the drive started, with no risk of scoring the platters. That left the locked service area. The ROM chip was desoldered from the PCB, read on a programmer, unlocked on PC-3000, rewritten and soldered back. A full backup of the service area followed, then the configuration modules (the drive's « passport », which holds its operating parameters) were edited to stop the drive from running its self-repair routines, which are destructive in this condition. On Data Extractor, the head map showed which heads still responded: the accessible zones were imaged first. The drive was then stopped, the head stack replaced with a compatible donor set, and imaging resumed to extract the remainder.
Result : The drive was never plugged in again after the fall, and that is what made a complete recovery possible: 100 % of the data read, with no missing sectors. The entire photo and video archive was returned to the photographer, ready the day after drop-off.
